• Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.137-146
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• 2006

This is the second of a two-part paper which describes comparison of reliability design methods by application to Donghae Harbor Breakwaters. In this paper, Part 2, we deal with sliding of caissons. The failure modes of a vertical breakwater, which consists of a caisson mounted on a rubble mound, include the sliding and overturning of the caisson and the failure of the rubble mound or subsoil, among which most frequently occurs the sliding of the caisson. The traditional deterministic design method for sliding failure of a caisson uses the concept of a safety factor that the resistance should be greater than the load by a certain factor (e.g. 1.2). However, the safety of a structure cannot be quantitatively evaluated by the concept of a safety factor. On the other hand, the reliability design method, for which active research is being performed recently, enables one to quantitatively evaluate the safety of a structure by calculating the probability of failure of the structure. The reliability design method is classified into three categories depending on the level of probabilistic concepts being employed, i.e., Level 1, 2, and 3. In this study, we apply the reliability design methods to the sliding of the caisson of the breakwaters of Donghae Harbor, which was constructed by traditional deterministic design methods to be damaged in 1987. Analyses are made for the breakwaters before the damage and after reinforcement. The probability of failure before the damage is much higher than the allowable value, indicating that the breakwater was under-designed. The probability of failure after reinforcement, however, is close to the allowable value, indicating that the breakwater is no longer in danger. On the other hand, the results of the different reliability design methods are in fairly good agreement, confirming that there is not much difference among different methods.